The Konstanz natural video database (KoNViD-1k)

TLDR

Subjective video quality assessment depends on semantics, context, and distortion types, yet existing databases contain only a few artificially distorted sequences. The authors aim to provide a large, real‑world video dataset with subjective MOS to support objective VQA development, especially for deep‑learning models, and to enable training of general‑purpose methods on diverse content. They created KoNViD‑1k, a 1,200‑video, publicly available database sampled from YFCC100m, with subjective annotations and design choices to capture authentic distortions across varied content.

Abstract

Subjective video quality assessment (VQA) strongly depends on semantics, context, and the types of visual distortions. Currently, all existing VQA databases include only a small number of video sequences with artificial distortions. The development and evaluation of objective quality assessment methods would benefit from having larger datasets of real-world video sequences with corresponding subjective mean opinion scores (MOS), in particular for deep learning purposes. In addition, the training and validation of any VQA method intended to be ‘general purpose’ requires a large dataset of video sequences that are representative of the whole spectrum of available video content and all types of distortions. We report our work on KoNViD-1k, a subjectively annotated VQA database consisting of 1,200 public-domain video sequences, fairly sampled from a large public video dataset, YFCC100m. We present the challenges and choices we have made in creating such a database aimed at ‘in the wild’ authentic distortions, depicting a wide variety of content.